A snowy Sunday

It's snowing again here, and the snow from last weekend hadn't even left. Pretty unusual for here. We're staying home and baking cookies. Nathan went out to Home Depot on of many fixer-upper trips. He's doing a new towel rack in my bathroom and phone cord rewiring for the fax machine.

This morning, we met with the last in a series of doulas. We're going to work with this woman, who seems great. Her name is Dawn. She'll be helping us with the birth, at home and in the hospital. She brought her doula bag to show us all of her tricks, and it was this huge bag full of things to make me feel good during labor - very persuasive. All manner of massaging oils and tools, relaxation music, lollipops, a big terrycloth bag of oats and lavender that can be heated up in the microwave and strapped around my lower back, a "birthing ball" to sit on or lean over, etc. She's been doing this for seven years, so it's comforting to have someone else on hand with more experience at this than we have.

She also pointed out that I look "ready to go". I'm supposed to have at least another 2 weeks here, but people keep commenting on how I've dropped and I could "go" at any time. Theoretically, it could be another month, though. My yoga teacher also seems to think I'll never make it to next week's class. I think that part of it is that I'm more uncomfortable now with the baby lower, so I'm really waddling around.

Last night, we went to the movies (saw "In Good Company" which amused me a lot), and when we came out of the theater, my hands had swollen up so big that my gloves were tight. This is really the first swelling I've had, and it's gone today, but that was pretty freakish. Thankfully, I haven't had that crazy ankle and foot swelling that so many people seem to get. As Nathan pointed out, it's a good thing that I stopped wearing my wedding ring on my finger. After my colleague Sharen's hands swelled at 7 months, and her wedding ring was stuck on her finger, cutting into her skin, it scared us both enough for me to take mine off. Nathan gave me a beautiful white gold necklace as an anniversary present, and I've been wearing my ring around my neck since then.

The New York Times had a funny story on baby blogs today - I came up to post a link to it, and saw that Callie had already sent it to me electronically. You guys are all looking out for me! So, apparently, people all over the country are blogging their children in way too much detail. Didn't mention prenatal blogging, though. Eventually, this will have to turn into Zack's story and not mine, I suppose. Or maybe just my version of Zack's story.

Some excerpts from The Times article:

Today's parents - older, more established and socialized to voicing their emotions - may be uniquely equipped to document their children's' lives, but what they seem most likely to complain and marvel about is their own. The baby blog in many cases is an online shrine to parental self-absorption. [...]

Parents have never waited longer nor thought more consciously about having children, yet time and again the bloggers voice surprise and sometimes resentment about the unglamorous reality of bringing up baby.

"Honestly I had a lot of illusions about motherhood," said Eden Marriott Kennedy, who was 37 when she had her first child and now writes about him at Fussy.org. "You get settled in your ways. Until it's here, you really don't know how dehumanizing and ugly parenting can be sometimes. The blog's a place where all that stuff can go."

Hmmm.